Stolen - Nhys Glover Page 0,40
bond from Rian. And I have. Even after only this short time I understand a lot better what my sister must have felt.” He reached across and lifted my chin so I was forced to look up at him.
“A crush is a young person’s fascination with another; a passing, if intense, attraction. Rian’s mother told him about her embarrassing crushes when she was young. What Rian feels for you is not that. It is less emotional and at the same time deeper than that. It isn’t love, or what I would identify as love. It goes beyond love.”
Charsus paused, trying to find words to describe what he was feeling. Or what Rian was feeling. How did that even work?
“Many creatures have a biological imperative to protect their offspring and their tribe. It is not based on another’s admirable traits but on something more essential. Survival. The survival of the species. That is what drives this young Danan. It is not a passing obsession. It is not sexual, although he feels an intense sexual attraction to you. So, I suppose I should say it is not just sexual.
“Rian needs you in a way he has never needed anyone, not even his parents or brothers. You are his world now. He would go anywhere and do anything you required of him. He feels frustrated by his limits: my body, his age, and his inability to find the answers to your problems. He feels he needs to be everything to you because his brothers aren’t here to take up their share of the responsibility for you. His total focus on you is a terrible weakness. Yet, at the same time, it is his greatest strength, I think.” He paused, his gaze darting from one of my eyes to the other, searching for something. “What it is not, is a passing crush.”
What did I say to that? It was at once more than I deserved and at the same time far less than I wanted. I didn’t deserve to be someone’s world, and yet I wanted to be loved more than life itself. I thought it was love I was feeling for the young Danan. I thought it was love, even if a temporary kind, he was feeling for me. Now I didn’t understand at all. I was back to feeling like nothing more than a womb he and his brothers would use to continue their genetic line. Survival. That was all I meant to him. Survival of his species. A burden he was forced to carry for his brothers.
Something in my eyes must have given me away. Charsus groaned and released my chin.
“I can see I am not helping. Feelings are very unfamiliar to me. I left them behind a long time ago.”
I studied the elven creature sitting naked beside me, curious about him for the first time. “How can you leave feelings behind?”
“Have you ever enjoyed doing something obsessively, until you became bored with it?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. When I was a kid I’d been obsessed with playing the guitar. I played it every spare moment. Then, for some reason, I didn’t get the buzz out of it that I used to. Eventually, I gave up playing. That guitar still sat in the back of my bedroom closet at my mom’s house.
“Yes,” I answered simply.
“That is how feelings are for me. After the first hundred years of life I got bored with the constant push and pull of emotions. They are so damned exhausting. I preferred the peace of stepping away from feelings.” He gave a little laugh. “And now I’m being forced to feel them all over again, even more intensely than I ever did in my own youth.”
He cocked his head to the side, as if either listening to a voice in his head or reflecting on some, as yet, unexpressed thought. In the end, I got my answer.
“Exhausting but enervating. I haven’t felt this alive in a very, very long time.”
“Did you ever love someone?” I asked, feeling a little less awkward the more I got to know the stranger whose beautiful body I was mesmerized by.
He shook his head. “Not the kind of love I think you mean. I loved my sister and probably my parents, although it is hard to love someone who is incapable of loving you back. No, not incapable of loving you back, incapable of loving you the same way you love them. Detached love is still love.”
I mused on this